GoKawiilMicrosoft swears this is not a monitoring tool and told Fortune that "protecting employee privacy is at the core of how we innovate and build." And that may be true to a degree because admins have no reporting dashboard, no historical location logs and no way to query where someone has been. Employees can also manually override or clear their location at any time and the feature doesn't function outside of working hours.
Still, when you're the only one on the team who denies this feature out of privacy concerns, there's an imbalance. The "voluntary" aspect of adopting this feature on a personal level suddenly feels like pressure.
An ExpressVPN survey found that 80 percent of employers engage in remote work surveillance. The American Psychological Association says 56 percent of workers who experience monitoring by their employer feel tense or stressed out at work. Ironically, even Microsoft's analysis of the effects of digital surveillance classifies tracking a person's physical location and body movements as one of the most invasive methods of Electronic Performance Monitoring.
Microsoft itself has mandated that employees living within 50 miles of a company office must work on-site at least three days a week. Rolling out a Wi-Fi based location feature on the same platform while enforcing a return-to-office policy may not necessarily be related, but it's hard to ignore the optics.
So, here we are: there's yet another location tracking feature threatening employee privacy built into an app used by over 1 million organizations across the world. The biggest question right now isn't whether Microsoft built the feature with bad intentions; it's whether companies deploying it will find ways to abuse it.